By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

 

It is now more than 200 days or over eight months to be exact, of the hunger strike in prison of one of the most prominent victims of human rights violations in Bahrain, but neither have the so-called international human rights bodies focused on his plight nor is the repressive minority regime ready meet his simple request to hand over to his family the non-political research which he has compiled.

Dr. Abdul-Jalil as-Sankis, an academic and human rights defender began his hunger strike on 8th July 2021, in protest to years of denial of medical treatment, degrading treatment by prison staff and confiscation of material for a book he has been writing on Bahraini dialects and culture without any political content.

The 60-year old has been serving an arbitrary life sentence since his arrest in 2011 for participating in the peaceful pro-democracy rally by tens of thousands of Bahraini citizens at the now demolished Pearl Square in the capital Manama.

An engineer by profession and formerly head of the engineering department of Bahrain University (dismissed in 2005 for his defence of the birthrights of the country’s long suppressed majority), he has been subjected to torture and refused permission to contact his family.

Dr. Sankis is not the lone victim of the pro-Zionist Aal-e Khalifa minority regime, whose bleak, black, and bloody record of human rights violations have been ignored, if not tacitly supported, by the US, Britain, and other western powers, for having backstabbed the Palestinians and betrayed the cause of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

The regime of pirate origin which is notorious for its desecration of mosques and hussainiyahs and its blasphemous trampling of copies of the holy Qur’an, has jailed for no offence some 3,800 Bahrainis, including senior religious leader Sheikh Ali Salman (former head of the opposition in the dissolved parliament), Abdul-Hadi al-Khwaja (co-founder of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights –BCHR), Hassan Mushaima, the 75-year old Secretary General of the al-Haq Movement and many others.

Bahrain’s senior-most religious leader, Ayatollah Isa Qasim, has been exiled and the Shi’a Muslim majority banned from holding the weekly Friday Prayer, while the regime has granted extensive plots of lands to Jews, Christians, and Hindus, to build synagogues, churches, and temples.        

There are several women among the detainees being held without trial as well as youths below 15 years of age, who are regularly tortured by the jailors on the direct orders of the ruler, Sheikh Hamad, who styles himself as king.

Some 500 of these political inmates are serving prison sentences of over 20 years, but the US, Britain, and even the UN human rights circles are the least perturbed because the Aal-e Khalifa regime is an Israeli protégé and a partner in the West’s Islamophobia campaign.

The suppressive atmosphere, however, is not expected to last long, in view of the fact the younger Bahrainis having lost hope in the peaceful campaign for democracy in their homeland, are increasingly turning towards the simmering armed uprising.

This means the day is not far when Bahrain will become free of the tentacles of the Aal-e Khalifa, who cannot be saved by the West or by the illegal Zionist regime.